The Ten Steps To Wealth Blog

What Is Success And How Is It Achieved?

“Does Hard Work Lead To Success?”

At a recent Teen Award Ceremony in the US, actor Ashton Kutcher started a short speech by saying, “First of all, I don’t have a career without you guys. I don’t get to do anything without you guys.”

The acknowledgement of the other half of “success” was an interesting opening comment I thought.

The “other half” it seems, is something that’s often missing in any description of what success is.

Kutcher went on to say that in his experience “opportunity” looks like hard work. He then described a number of low skill jobs he worked in during his late teens and early twenties… noting especially that he had never had a job in his life that he was “better than”.

Yet how many people do you know who do the exact opposite? The most graphic of these are people who prefer the dole rather than taking on jobs they perceive they’re better than. Of course this is not an across the board thing as many people would take on any job if only they could get one.

The point I’m making though is that when people ask me how to become wealthy, depending on their current circumstances in life, I often start by saying… “Get a job”. Any job. The reason behing me saying this is because they could then use the “money” to undertake the next stage of their learning. The replies that shock me the most come from an attitude implying that they are much bigger than just any job.

When I was starting out on my journey to financial freedom, I worked four part time jobs. At one job I was paid $15 per day wrecking houses. (But the real value in this job was what I learned. It allowed me renovate houses and acquire second hand materials which I could then renovate and reuse. This enabled me to create my first $100,000 in asset value within 6 months).

The reason for 4 part time jobs, instead of one secure full time job, was so that I could work more hours and more days which meant that I earned more money than one full time job. I could then apply this money to learning the important lessons I needed to learn. In fifteen years of teaching people how to become wealthy, I’ve never met anyone who was willing to start this way. That they are still not financially successful is telling.

Another idea Kutcher promoted in his talk was the idea of being “sexy” which he described as “being smart… thoughtful and generous”.

A third offering came as a result of remembering something Steve Jobs often talked about. Jobs observed that as we grow up, enculturation teaches us that the world is the way it is and that we should live our lives inside this world. We’re told to follow the rules, not get into trouble, get a good education, get a good job, make some money, become a good consumer, get married, have a family and so on as the rest of the story goes.

The point he was making is that life is much bigger than Enculturation’s Plan for the masses. The idea that life doesn’t have to look like a life on the “work/stress, not enough time, not enough money treadmill” is foreign to most people. Instead of building a life experienced around the idea of financial freedom, generation after generation fall into the trap of having a life based on the consumption code and servitude, rather than purposefully building a life based on the enterprise code and freedom.

While I’m not sure how much of his own wisdom Kutcher was sharing, as opposed to the wisdom of Steve Jobs given the film he’s just made… none the less, it’s hard to fault the wisdom itself.

While hard work may indeed lead to success, it is not the cause of success itself. One of the reasons for this is that success, in any endeavour, does not follow the “cause and effect” principle. Success is actually an “emergent”. No matter how hard you try, something else has to provide the spark…

The concept of “emergence” has been around since the time of Aristotle but the term emergent was coined in 1875 by pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes who said that… “Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same — their difference, when their directions are contrary.”

As an emergent, success unfolds as a result of a series of effective moment-by-moment decisions made from a large number of options available every time you need to make a choice.

Instead of every day placing themselves in positions where an emergent process can happen, most people continue to place themselves into positions where servitude, predictability, and sameness always happen.